Out-of-date or inappropriate email distribution lists can result in members of teams not receiving email intended for them. For example, new joiners or temporary visitors may be on official lists but not those kept in other places or manually maintained lists. In order to see the email, the people who didn't receive it first have to find out that they were missed off and then request for someone else to provide them with a copy.
FIG. 1 provides an overview of this problem. Server 10 receives emails from various clients (two shown 20, 30). Server 10 hosts mailboxes 40, with each mailbox being owned by a receiving client 50. All mail for a particular receiving client is stored in the mailbox associated with that client. Email application 60 on the server adds and retrieves mail from appropriate mailboxes at the behest of the clients.
It will be appreciated that some emails from clients 20, 30 may not be addressed to clients having a mailbox on the server. In this case, email application 80 forwards such emails onto an appropriate email server 90. This process is known in the art and so will not be discussed in any more detail herein.
Some emails will be addressed to a group of people rather than just a single recipient. Clients 20, 30 may reference a server-based distribution list 95 (or that of another email server—not shown). Alternatively, clients 20, 30 may spell out each person's name or use their own locally resolvable distribution list.
As alluded to above, sending emails to groups of people can prove problematic. Originating client 20 may use an official distribution list, recently updated to include a number of new joiners to a team. Client 30, on the other hand, may have their own local version of the same distribution list. Manually maintained lists can easily become out of date and can result in certain people being left out. Therefore, there is a need for a method, apparatus and computer program for identifying discrepancies in an email distribution list.